Here's one of the many things that settles the Bob Kerrey thing for
me, and it doesn't even address the issue of what exactly he did in the
Vietnamese village of Thanh Phong. Supposedly riddled with indecision
whether to accept the Medal of Honor for a military action subsequent to
the one now under dispute, he finally did so on May 14, 1970, just 10
days after after the Ohio National Guard killed four anti-war student
protesters at Kent State.
In other words, at a moment of maximal national revulsion against the
Vietnam War, former Sen. Kerrey went along with the Pentagon's urgent
desire for heroes and presented his chest to President Richard M. Nixon,
who pinned the medal to it. So much for "ambiguity," one of the words
used now to salvage his reputation. And now, and only now, is he
considering whether to give back the Bronze Star awarded him for the 1969
mission in which (if you believe, as I do, his fellow SEAL Gerhard
Klanncq) he assisted in the throat-slitting of an elderly Vietnamese
peasant and ordered the killing of 13 women and babies, or (if you
believe him) less wittingly supervised the slaughter of an old man and 13
or more women and children.
It's pretty clear that Kerrey's raid was part of the CIA's Phoenix
program (as was My Lai, where "Task Force Barker" killed 504 men, women
and children the preceding year). The intent of Phoenix was terror,
precisely the killing of not only suspected Viet Cong, but also their
families. The late William Colby, the CIA man who ran the program, told
Congress that between 1967-1971, 20,587 Vietnamese "activists" were
killed under the Phoenix program. The South Vietnamese declared that
41,000 had been killed. Other estimates go as high as 70,000.
Barton Osborn, an intelligence officer in the Phoenix program, spelled
out in a congressional hearing the prevailing bureaucratic attitude of
the agents toward their campaign of terror: "Quite often it was a matter
of expediency just to eliminate a person in the field rather than deal
with the paperwork."
And who was classified as a "VC sympathizer" and, therefore, fair game
to be slaughtered by units like Kerrey's? The CIA's Robert Ramsdell, one
of the two men who developed the My Lai operation, said, "Anyone in that
area was considered a VC sympathizer because they couldn't survive in
that area unless they were sympathizers." Thanh Phong was in "that area,"
which lends credence to Klann's account of what Kerrey's raiders did.
The death squads run by the CIA men supervising Phoenix were a
particular favorite of the man who pinned the medal on Kerrey: Nixon.
After My Lai there was a move to reduce funding for these killing
programs. According to journalist Seymour Hersh, Nixon passionately
objected: "No. We've got to have more of this. Assassinations. Killings."
The funding was swiftly restored.
When he was at Newsweek in 1998, reporter Gregory Vistica had Kerrey
cold, but the newsmagazine's editors decided that since Kerrey was no
longer a presidential candidate it wasn't worth exposing him. It was
apparently OK for a U.S. senator to be an alleged war criminal. Then the
New York Times finally decided to run Vistica's story because Kerrey had
left the Senate. Given the lack of disquiet among faculty and students,
it's also apparently OK for an alleged war criminal like Kerrey to be
head of the New School University in New York, which in earlier days
hosted refugees from Nazi Germany.
So will the Kerrey brouhaha nudge the nation or Congress into
confronting the past and what the Vietnam War really involved? Of course
not. Right before the last election, CounterPunch, the newsletter I
co-edit, ran a story by Doug Valentine, who wrote "The Phoenix Program,"
one of the best histories of what really happened in Vietnam. Valentine's
CounterPunch story concerned Robert Simmons, in the midst of an
ultimately successful campaign to represent Connecticut in Congress. The
specific charge against Simmons, originally leveled in the Connecticut
paper New London Day in 1994 was that he routinely violated the Geneva
Convention while interrogating civilian prisoners during his 20 months of
service with the CIA in Vietnam. Simmons claimed he'd always steered
clear of the dirty stuff. Same way Kerrey claims that when his unit cut
the throats of the old folk in a Thanh Phong peasant hut, he was outside.
When Simmons was battling to become a congressman (after a long career
in state government in Connecticut), no national paper cared a whit about
the fact that a possible torturer and war criminal was on the hustings.
Small wonder Congress is being protective of Kerrey, admonishing the
Pentagon not to probe what happened at Thanh Phong. How many executive
agents of the Phoenix program are strolling up and down the aisles of
government?
Alexander Cockburn writes for the Nation and other publications.
Copyright © 2001 Los Angeles Times
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